I grew up in the 1950s and early 1960’s.  I can remember running through the neighborhood when we were twelve or thirteen doing silly kid stuff like knocking on doors and running (ding,dong ditch) or throwing crabapples at cars.

A couple of times the police caught us – one time was when I jumped up from the bushes and threw a crabapple and realized it was a police car too late.  The police would always let us off with a warning, but I remember that night they took our names and said that this was now going to be in our “permanent record” so we’d better not get into trouble again.  I believed it for a while until one day I thought about it again and realized they had made it up.  They were just being nice and still trying to scare us.  I got into trouble again when I was 14 my buddy and I took my dad’s car out for a spin at three in the morning.  They let me off with a warning that time too, after calling our parents and telling them to punish us.  My dad hung the spare car keys up in the same place and said. “I’m trusting that you won’t do this again.” I never did. The father of the kid that got caught with me used a different form of discipline and beat him with a rope.

The point of this brief venture into my childhood is to note that there are a lot of things we do when we’re kids that we get a free pass for. 

But where do you draw the line.  This past week Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh has been accused of an attempted rape a drunken high school party when he was 17.  Misdeeds done at high school drinking parties tend to be overlooked, but not all of them. There are many instances of 14 or 15 year old kids being tried as adults because of the seriousness of their alleged crime.  But the question has to be raised that why did Christine Blasey Ford wait over thirty years to bring these charges up? One reason cited is that the #MeToo movement has raised the consciousness of women everywhere that such crimes need to be reported. It also doesn’t take much imagination to theorize that the Democrats hunted around until they found Ms.Ford since this Supreme Court appointment is turning into an all-out political war.

On Friday, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted to confirm the nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, moving the confirmation process along to a full floor vote in the U.S. Senate, with the request that a full FBI investigation be conducted concerning Ford’s accusations.  That should be the end of the matter, but it’s not.  For one thing there’s the issue that Sen. Diane Feinstein, D-Calif., did not disclose the sexual assault allegations to Republicans, the FBI and Kavanaugh himself for weeks after she was contacted by Ford. And on top of this, Feinstein recommended anti-Trump resistance lawyer Deborah Katz to Ford, who went on to hire Katz and her law partner.  Had Feinstein informed the Judiciary Committee back in July, when Ford contacted her, of Ford’s allegations, the public hearing of those allegations could have been avoided. The committee could have investigated the allegations privately and confidentially, as Ford requested, and there could have been a thorough FBI investigation. This could have prevented the unimaginable pain and pressure on Ford, Kavanaugh and their families involved by airing the allegations that have dominated the news  But Feinstein chose not to do any of those things. And that tells us what her true intentions were. Now we know. By holding a public hearing on Ford’s allegations in which she testified, Feinstein and her follow Democrats on the committee were preparing Ford for use as a political weapon.

For the Democrats, this whole episode is not actually about women’s rights. If that was the case, Democrats would be equally outraged about the alleged conduct of Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., who is also deputy chairman of the Democratic National Committee and is now running for attorney general in his home state.  Ellison’s former girlfriend has accused him of emotional and physical abuse. He has denied the allegations.  Nor are Democrats motivated by “social justice,” the “arc of history” or overturning the “patriarchy.” This is all about overturning the 2016 election.

The Democrats fear that if they let President Trump fill the vacant seat on the Supreme Court, their power is lost for a generation or more.  So as they have now shown us, Democrats will pay any price to keep their power. Ford can be thrown to the wolves. Kavanaugh can be destroyed – after all, he’s just a white male Republican.  Trust in the Senate and the Supreme Court can be casually undermined – as long as the Democrats win. Worst of all, the fabric of our society can just be ripped to pieces, as long as Democrats hold on to the biggest piece.

Judge Brett Kavanaugh is almost certainly going to be appointed the next member of the Supreme Court of the United States. Whatever Christine Blasey Ford said in her testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday, and whatever Kavanaugh said in his, and however credible and convincing either one seemed, none of it was going to affect this virtual inevitability. The Republicans, if they stick together, have the necessary votes. A veneer of civility made it seem as if the senators were questioning Ford and Kavanaugh to get to the truth of whether Kavanaugh, as a drunk teen-ager, attended a party where he pinned Ford to a bed and sexually assaulted her, thirty-six years ago. But that’s not what the hearing was designed to explore. At the time of this writing, composed in the eighth hour of the grotesque historic activity happening in the Capitol Hill chamber, it should be as plain as day that what we witnessed was the patriarchy testing how far its politics of resentment can go. And there is no limit.

Dressed in a blue suit, taking the oath with nervous solemnity, Ford gave us a bristling sense of déjà vu. “Why suffer through the annihilation if it’s not going to matter?” Ford had told the Washington Post when she first went public with her allegations. With the word “annihilation” she conjured the spectre of Anita Hill, who, in her testimony against Clarence Thomas, in 1991, was basically berated over an exhausting two-day period, and diagnosed, by the senators interrogating her, with “erotomania” and a case of man-eating professionalism. Ford’s experience—shaped by the optics of the #MeToo moment, by her whiteness and country-club roots—was different. The Republicans on the committee, likely coached by some consultant, did not overtly smear Ford. Some pretended, condescendingly, to extend her empathy. Senator Orrin Hatch, who once claimed that Hill had lifted parts of her harassment allegations against Thomas from “The Exorcist,” called Ford “pleasing,” an “attractive” witness. Instead of questioning her directly, the Republicans hired Rachel Mitchell, a female prosecutor specializing in sex crimes, to serve as their proxy. Mitchell’s fitful, sometimes aimless questioning did the ugly work of softening the Republican assault on Ford’s testimony. Ford, in any case, was phenomenal, a “witness and expert” in one, and it seemed, for a moment following her testimony, that the nation might be unable to deny her credibility.

Media around the world has also zoomed in on Kavanaugh’s performance, with British news organizations in particular ridiculing Kavanaugh for his repeated denials of having high school drinking habits, and for unconvincingly painting a picture of his past as a conscientious student too consumed with sports to have time for women.

In the Opinion section of the Guardian, Marina Hyde wrote a satirical re-imagination of the hearing, in which she mocked Kavanaugh for his performance, including his moment of crying.

“I cannot stress how absolutely irrelevant things that happened in high school are. They are irrelevant, and meaningless. Do you know how much I worked out at Tobin’s house during high school? Do you know what I could bench press in high school?” she wrote, in a caricature of Kavanaugh.

The Economist took a more serious tone and criticized Kavanaugh’s lack of judgement and his “hostility towards the left,” saying it “would would make him an exceptionally divisive addition to the court.”

“Based on the day’s hearings, the justice committee should not vote to support Mr Kavanaugh’s confirmation,” it wrote.

In France, BFMTV’s diplomatic editor, Ulysse Gosset, said of Kavanaugh’s performance: “He deserves an Oscar because in reality he’s on shaky ground.”

In a commentary piece for Germany’s Zeit Online, Carsten Luther criticized the entire hearing as a partisan “spectacle” in which senators had failed on several counts, including to take Ford’s sex assault allegations seriously while giving Kavanaugh the presumption of innocence.

“Political operations in Washington have reached that point where senators can meet the current US president on an equal footing: at the bottom,” Luther wrote.

“On Thursday, millions of Americans could follow live something that looked like a search for truth, but only on the surface. It was not about taking the alleged victim of a sexual assault seriously while maintaining the presumption of innocence against the alleged perpetrator until the opposite could be proved. Power and the fear of losing it were the motivations for the spectacle, which, playing out over hours, showed what divides this country.”

In a blog for the magazine Marie Claire in South Africa, Zoya Pon called on South African women to take note of the Kavanaugh case, stressing that it would have implications for women in her own country and abroad.  “The outcome of the case will inevitably ripple internationally, affecting many things — not limited to — how we react to, vote, prosecute, and speak about the sexual violence affecting us politically, socially and legally.”

In a column for South Africa’s News 24, Serjeant at the Bar, who writes on legal issues, pointed to the lack of progress in addressing sexual misconduct allegations since Anita Hill’s testimony in 1991.  “If the US has hardly progressed in being earnest about alleged sexual impropriety since the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearings, can it be said that the legal profession in this country has transformed itself from the white male club which has been operative since the dawn of the profession in South Africa?”

“How many male lawyers would still say, ‘You cannot take seriously that which Judge Kavanaugh did when he was a student?'”

Millions of Americans have been deeply and emotionally engaged by Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearing and the astonishing spectacle that unfolded in the Senate Judiciary Committee.  It is absolutely right to say that we are in a vital cultural moment. Ending sexual misconduct and the abuse, exploitation and harassment of women by men is long overdue. But we are also in a vital political moment. Just as we’re moving in the right direction on gender equality, we’re moving in the wrong direction when it comes to politics.Late Friday, Trump ordered a supplemental investigation into the allegations, something the GOP could have done to clear someone they claim is innocent. The senators could have done that themselves, but instead, they boldly raised the flags of entitlement, white privilege and don’t-you-frigging-question-me and tried to rush a confirmation before we could learn too much about Kavanaugh, refusing to swear in Judge, refusing to let the FBI put the matter to rest.

The hearing gripped much of the country, but with so many questions and a wave of media coverage in response it can be difficult to keep track of all the developments.  Here are some interesting parts that you may have missed.

Dr Ford claims Judge Kavanaugh tried to force himself on her at a party in 1982. The incident allegedly happened at a gathering of teenagers at a house, when Judge Kavanaugh and his friend were both drunk. Mr Kavanaugh shared his high school calendar with the Senate committee as supporting evidence that he did not attend a party or drink on weekdays during that time. “If the party… happened in the summer of 1982 on a weekend night, my calendar shows all but definitively that I was not there,” he told the hearing. But one entry – on Thursday 1 July – indicates that he may have drunk beer at a social event. It reads ‘Go to Timmy’s for Skis’, which Mr Kavanaugh said likely meant beers. The judge shared five pages of his 1982 calendar to show he was not at a party as Prof Ford alleges.

As well as his calendar, Mr Kavanaugh’s high school yearbook came under close scrutiny. He was asked about the use of the phrase “Devil’s triangle” which he said was a type of drinking game. But some people were skeptical, instead believing the term was a sexual reference. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham was forthright in his assessment of proceedings. “This is the most unethical sham since I’ve been in politics,” he declared furiously. He then took aim at the Democrats: “What you want to do is destroy this guy’s life, hold this seat open and hope you win in 2020.” His comments were noticed by the White House, with Press Secretary Sarah Sanders praising his “decency and courage”. But many Democrats stood firm and expressed their continued support for Dr Ford, including Senator Elizabeth Warren who later tweeted “We believe her.”  Dr Ford has claimed Mr Kavanaugh was drunk when the alleged incident happened, which meant there were a number of questions about his drinking habits. “What do you consider to be too many beers?” Republican prosecutor Rachel Mitchell said. “I don’t know. You know… whatever the chart says, a blood-alcohol chart,” he responded. He also said that he was legally allowed to drink beer while at school in Maryland as the state’s drinking age increased to 21 when he was 17.

The US has been here before.  Matthew Knott from Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald pointed out that Thursday’s hearing was a little bit of “history repeating.” The United States had experienced a similar moment 27 years ago, he wrote, when Anita Hill was questioned by an all-male panel on her allegations of sexual harassment by Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas. ‘I reported a powerful man, but can’t imagine how Christine Ford feels.”  In 1991, Thomas said: “This is a circus. It’s a national disgrace,” Knott wrote.  On Thursday, Kavanaugh made almost the exact same comments. “This is a circus,” he said. “This confirmation process has become a national disgrace.”  Knott criticized the senators for descending into “an all-out partisan brawl” and questioned why the FBI would not be asked to investigate the allegations and key witnesses won’t testify.  “That makes possible one of two unpalatable outcomes. “Either a female survivor of sexual assault who bravely went public with her story will, yet again, be disbelieved. Or an innocent man will have his career shredded by unproven claims not supported by corroborating evidence.”

Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats have come off well in this situation. But then again, that is the show that has become American politics.  Rock musician, genius composer, guitarist, conductor, etc. the late great Frank Zappa once said that “politics is the entertainment division of the Military/Industrial complex.  It was a pretty extreme statement when he made it. Not anymore.